~ Author & Scrivnomancer

Tag Archives: white wolf novel

Craziness and delirium. I haven’t posted properly in some time…but I’ve been wading through Craziness and delirium. But more on that in a bit. First a word from our sponsor…THE 2007 SLIP N’ SLIDE PARTY!

Firstly, you may be tempted to speak like a pirate at the party, or may want to explore the nuances of the word booty. Please review the instructional video below…and study it in it’s entirety…it gets particularly informative in the middle. Go ahead. I’ll be here when you finish…

Feel educated? Good.

Hope to see everyone tomorrow at the party. If you get lost, have to disarm a bomb, or need any other info, you can reach me at 224-627-6836.

So where were we? Updating.

The last two weeks of my summer job were brutal. I could not sleep, not to the standard, diurnal beat. So up early in the morning and no more than 2 hours (sometimes less, sometimes none) sleep a night. On top of that, I was stressing on the revised outline for my White Wolf novel…due and due and past due to my editor. Generally, I find the term “Writer’s Block” to be a sham and a BS alibi, but I had nothing…felt pretty useless.

On that last Friday night of the day job, my body shut down—I laid down to take a short “nap” and didn’t wake up for 22 hours.

Now I’m back to comfortably, partial-nocturnal rhythm. I have my brain back too…and it’s nice–I missed it–just in time for Gen-Con, last weekend. I went to the gamming convention looking for work, contacts, and ideas. I hit a bunch of writing and pod casting seminars too. I imbibed some rum via flask and visited the White Wolf party (it’s the kind of party and the kind of club that Wesley Snipes might walk into and start cutting the heads off of your fellow dancers…only they aren’t dancers…they’re vampires…and holy shit…).

On a happy coincidence, my editor, James Lowder was in Indianapolis, at the convention, doing a writing seminar of his own (on doing freelance work in the gaming industry). So I braved the early morning after the White Wolf party (ugh!) and popped in the seminar to meet him in person. I waited (taking notes with all the other hopeful writers) until the seminar was over, before I introduced myself. He was surprised to learn who I was. “I’ve got a meeting with White Wolf right after this,” he said, “To talk about you.” That got the attention of the others in the seminar. Jim boosted my ego and elevated the worries of my previous, sleepless weeks, telling me that I had nothing to worry about, my writing was good and the things we needed to fix (large mechanical plot structures) were the easiest things to learn, that he could tell we’d work fine together, and that he’d heard nothing but good things from the folks at White Wolf, that they were really excited about the book. “Just great,” he said in mock alarm, “Now they’re not just expecting a novel as good as their other novels…”

I think I might have beamed a bit. “Thanks,” I said, “That…helps my hangover considerably.”

This week, I caught the stench of death. I knew my computer didn’t have much time. So I made the switch from PC to MAC and have spent much of the week in the laborious enterprise of safely getting all of my files over from one computer to the next . . . just in time for my PC to die on the last load.

That catches us up to now. There could be more details…but I have a party to prepare.

…one more thing though.

Sometimes one of your own gets their feelings hurt. Real bad. And there isn’t much you can do. Sometimes all you can do is give them an incredibly expensive journal from your own private stores, and let them bleed it all onto the page.

See.

The page is the skin—is the soul.

See.

You bleed out in pen scrawl-slices, spill the bad blood until your humors balance out.

This is falling off the Sears Tower and trying to tie your shoes on the way down, hard.

My imagination feels flaccid and useless.Going the next round is harder.The second draft of the book is harder than when you made it from scratch. Everything has a question mark on it.All aspects.My head is full of slugs and doubts and something slimy drips out of my ears.

I’m trying to remember if I was ever any good and on the off chance of that, how I did it.It’s like Superman is flying around, invincible and happy and someone shouts up, “Hey Supes, how do you fly?”—and he pauses, frowns, then plummets screaming and hits the ground—BAM—dead.And that’s when you learn that fear of success is as bad as fear of failure and I feel both of them now, double-teaming me in the ears.

Ugh…

But this isn’t a pity post.I know that I’m very fortunate to have this vexing task to begin with, fortunate to have the opportunity.Not a “woe-is-me” post.I know I’ll get to the other side somehow.But to do that, I have to extract it, strangle it, and slap it down on the page—safely transfix it to the screen, like a pinned butterfly in a collection.And then I catch all my vexations like that, pin each one down.And I give them all Latin names and show off my collection.“Here’s imaginationous limpus; here is phobos commitmenta; here is slothis totalis.”

Well you’re in your little roomAnd you’re working on something goodBut if it’s really goodYou’re gonna need a bigger roomAnd when you’re in the bigger roomYou might not know what to doYou might have to think ofHow you got started Sitting in your little room

-The White Stripes, “Little Room”

EGADS!!!

Over a month and no real post.I apologize.If I were the White Rabbit, my watch would have exploded and the Queen of Hearts would have disemboweled me by now . . . or was she a club?A spade?She should be spaded.Hehe . . . veterinary humor.

Working out preliminary concepts and notes and outlines on my novel, with my editor, James Lowder.I think it’ll be interesting…but there’s going to be a lot of work before we finish that final draft.Until then, I’ll have to keep meditating on absinthe and finding new ways to look at cadavers romantically.It’s not easy.I’m trying to get back into all the concepts and characters I’d thought of for the book, trying to remember what I was going for, what needs to be clipped away, what needs to be added—try and remember what it felt like, when the idea was fresh and new in my head in my dorm room, back then . . . and I feel stretch marks in my head . . . but once in a while I find that spark that started it all and then I think I might be on the right trail . . .

I’m Batman!…well…no…I’m actually just getting time and a half…

Nick and I finished up the filming we did as extras in the new Batman movie.It was interesting.We had to sign non-disclosure forms saying we wouldn’t tell anyone about the film . . . but we really don’t have much to tell anyway.One day we were inmates.Another day we were mobsters from the Maroni family

Ruin premiere coming up!

My friend, Matty Jacobson, will premiere his new film, Ruin, on the 21st.Nick is one of the stars in it and I dabbled, just a little bit, with one of the drafts of the script.

Magic . . . or something like it

So I’ve been a working stiff lately, in the mornings, and it’s playing havoc on my nocturnal biorhythms.I teach two classes of magic and sleight of hand to children at an Orthodox Jewish summer camp in the city.These kids have hardcore Hebrew names and my Gentile throat has struggled with flemmy sounds . . . but with their help, I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Lenore

Lenore, my beautiful indigo serpent, turns three years old tomorrow.I’ve raised her from a twelve inch hatchling, to a six foot monster (and she still has some growing to do).I think in about two years she’ll be big enough to turn and devour her master.In that event, I’ll leave some mysterious manuscripts in the skeleton trunk on my bookshelf, to be published posthumously.

Musing on Obsidian Darkly…

I’ve been doing a few late night coffee outings with my good friend, Brayton lately (as he’s moved back into the immediate area).This has led to those wonderfully strange, witching-hour, caffeine driven conversations where our eccentric dialogue eventually leads us to a place where we both agree on writing a story called something like “And Then I Cut Off His Head With A Broken Toilet.”

A little more coffee led to . . .

Brayton:Ah, obsidian.

Josh:Obsidian is the coolest substance ever.

Brayton:Indeed.

Josh:I want all my possessions to be made of obsidian.I want . . . hey!What if the toilet in the story is made of obsidian?

Brayton:[laughs dismissively]Riiiiiiight.Who the hell has an obsidian toilet?

Josh:. . . Michael Clark Duncan?

Brayton:. . . okay.

Slip n’ Slide, puppets, Slip n’ Slide

Still got your calendars out?MARK THIS.It’s time for our next annual SLIP N’ SLIDE party—the revelry will take place on the last Saturday of August, August 25th and will carry on, strong, all the way into Sunday.BE THERE—if you’ve been to one of our slip n’ slide bashes, then you know why.If not…then you need to find out.You are invited (yes, YOU).More details on this later…

Oh she keeps slippin’ away—an REM Persephone

Met this really cool girl . . .

but I can’t remember her name.

I met this really cool girl . . .

but the alarm keeps taking her away.

That’s all for today, lovelings.

Today’s post brought to you be the word posthumously, and the number π.